Prior to this, had minimal exposure to GraphQL. Our team settled tentatively on exploring GraphQL and I thought that I should better familiarize myself with the technology. As such, I followed a tutorial for intro to GraphQL from a website aptly named howtographql.com (https://www.howtographql.com/basics/0-introduction/)Before actually attempting to go through the tutorial, I watched tutorials and read medium articles about how GraphQL is spearheaded by Facebook, its advantages over REST API, and people opining about the state of GraphQL as a technological asset.
Going in, I did not know what Apollo was at all! After going through the tutorial, it seems that Apollo/Playground seems to be analagous to Postman / Insomnia, from the looks of it?
In particular with using plasma, the process is similar to Rails or Node where you do "yarn dev" or "rails s."
First impressions with Playground is that it seems to be more beginner-friendly. There is a "schema" green button on the right side of the IDE, which allows you to quickly reference schema.
What you learned:
- GraphQL's syntax takes a while to get used to but its advantages over REST API are fairly obvious, especially in terms of "clean-code" and minimalism.
- Playground is a nice in-browser IDE - I feel cheated by Insomnia / Postman haha.
- GraphQL is a way to ask for data from a server by a client that is flexible and can accommodate different types of information requested instead of "rigid" or "pre-defined," unflexible buckets of information. With GraphQL, you don't need to create 10 different endpoints when you can one "smart" endpoint essentially.
What didn't work: Nothing fundamentally was broken. There were certain syntax hiccups throughout the tutorial but otherwise I understood it.